A great deal of information is currently transmitted everywhere, and people come in contact with information, which is provided via information output apparatuses in effectively all locations.
In such information output apparatuses that provide a great deal of information for people, an important thing is how effectively information can be provided for users who receive the information. Thus, proposals relating to the information output apparatuses have been made.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2004-240301 proposes an information output apparatus realizing a text display method that can both display information, to which a user should pay attention, with appropriate-sized characters that are large enough to read, and increase the amount of displayable information in the display unit as a whole. This information output apparatus is designed to divide text to be displayed in the display unit into lines and edit each line using a different fixed number of characters, so as to display a specified line with large-sized characters and other lines with small-sized characters.
However, in the above conventional information output apparatus, the providing of information is not considered in view of a positional relationship between the user and the output device of the information output apparatus. In other words, the providing of information is made based on the information output apparatus, and information cannot be always provided for the user with efficiency.
This is because the user's ability to see the display of the output device and/or hear any associated audio may be constrained by the user's eyesight and/or hearing. In other situations, the user's viewing angle may prevent the viewing of the information displayed by the output device. These issues of distance and viewing angle in some cases may be combined to further complicate understanding of the output information. In other words, when the output device is away from the user or the user is in a location where it is difficult for the user to recognize information outputted from the output device, at least some of the information provided in detail cannot be recognized by the user, and thus it often results in no meaning.
Taking the above conventional information output apparatus as an example, it is difficult for a user to read small-sized characters, which are displayed with large-sized characters. Display of the small-sized characters together with the large-sized ones leads to a limited display area of the large-sized characters. In addition, if a great number of characters are displayed at a time, it will give the user the impression of a complicated layout, which may lose the user's attention to reading, even if the display includes useful information.